Hi, I’ Nikolai Latoya, I’m a Master Gardener, UC extension, Sacramento County, Co-coordinating the Compost Research and Workshop Area here in the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center and as you look down here, you’ll see that there’s ten, domestic style bins that are being compared with one another. We’re trying to find out the benefits, features and downside of each one of them, of the Home Style bins so that we can give some more idea to a home owner; which of these might be the best one for them o choose? And we’ll publish the results at the end of that and just some other research after that.
If we start over here Mike, we have the gourmet, garden gourmet. This is the first one of our line of ten. One of the advantages of it is that it’s, that it comes a part, and is easy to assemble. That also works out to be one of the disadvantages. We’ve, we typically find that when we want to turn the compost bin, we want to remove the bin and put the pile in. We just move the bin over one slot and flip the pile back into it by just turning it that way and adding water as we’re going. And this one many times, wants to come apart into pieces. It also has a really neat advantage that you can open this bin door down here and take compost out the bottom. When you’ve, when it’s ready. The next one here is called the home compost. There is none available right now, it’s not being manufactured just recently, has a very nice lid that does help to keep some of the moisture content higher. It’s very rigid.
When you use your fork and you’re going to be making your compost pile, you many times have to use the edges of compost bin to hold the fork, it’s kind of a fulcrum in the process and you need that sometimes and this is a good sturdy one so it looks well. This next one here is a, perhaps the simplest one and is the most elegant in some ways, I have three of these myself and I use them and I really, I really like them. You can simply just grab it, and slide it right off of the pile. Set it next to it and put the pile right back in. This ones is the Vespro model, we found it to work pretty well. It’s very similar to these models here, it has enough stencil strength on the edge to be able to use as a fulcrum. It has enough holes to allow the oxygen and air to come in. The one disadvantage I have fond so far on this is that really, every time you try to move it, it does come apart, so you have to re slide all the pieces back together just to reform it. But it really its, so far it has worked pretty well, the compost looks good in this.
The next one here is a dual bin. It’s called the Earth Engine and I think that the point of view that the manufacturer had was that you could turn one bin into. The other without any movement or disassembling at all, you can flip these slats in as high as you need them and you can take them out to change the, to turn the load. This is called the Compost Tumbler, this is the double model. There’s a single model, it has as you can see here, panels that remove. There’s a wall between the two. That’s , the manufacturer suggests that that’s so that you can have it going one that’s, already going and then begin another one as you’re, as you’re working along and so you can have them at different states of decomposition. And then once its, everything has been added into it, you close it up and tumble it by a handle over here on the side.
You can here it tumbling in there. I think they may design the tumblers, what they were looking for, trying to take some of the work of tumbling and turning the compost. Take that off, the burden off us and it works pretty well. The one thing that I have found with this particular one is that its tends is when the material is new and not decomposed. It tends to roll it in a big ball, so we have to get in there with a pitch fork and separate it, re wet it and then it works pretty well. The other disadvantages raising the material up so high into it and I think there is a given or take on this particular one but it works pretty well so far.
My co-coordinator Laury Murphy, this is her favorite of all the tumbler ones and there is one really advantage to it. Its really easy to get the material in and out, so if you want to tumble it and put it back in, you can open one of this and then just pour it right out. It also has an axel through the center. It tends to take the material as its falling and separate it, so its actually kind of churning it. So we found that that is an advantage on this particular one and the compost looks really good. This is kind of the favorite on the tumbler side of the compost bins as you can see. They are easy to tumble, its called the tumble weed and so that’s that one.
It has air vents on the ends and allows excess moisture to drip out if you have too much moisture in it. This is called the enviro cycle. You take it and you tumble it right on its stand. It has two vents at the bottom to allow excess moisture to fall out and it look like it doesn’t have the lid on quite well enough, so that could be a disadvantage on this particular one. You have to make sure its shut well enough but it seems to be doing a good job.
The next one here came in at the last minute. We found it, this one doesn’t give enough oxygen or air so initially we were getting some anaerobic situations going on. Anaerobic microbes will kill the beneficial microbes that are doing the work for us in the composting, so at first we had some trouble with it. We did discover that if we shut this, open this and turned it over we could actually drain out the extra moisture and so that kind of took care of that problem.
And the last went down here, its really setup as three chambers. The upper chamber here which has a shelf that you can pull out and drop below is the upper chamber and you’re doing your main decomposition up here. Pulling this up and then dropping it down and you start it again up here. This bin down below in the second section and when it gets to the third section you can take off the door and you can pull out of here and just use the compost that you’ve already formed. Meanwhile you have the first initial one going on up here and being formed, so that’s really a great advantage of that particular one.
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